CEO Tim Molloy An Agile World and What it Means For You

The pressure always seems to be on you! The need to do things more promptly and more efficiently! Does this sound familiar?

Landlords and tenants increasingly demand faster turnaround and better service. Even the ones who appear to be satisfied with your service would still opt for a smoother relationship in every interaction. Everyone seems to want you to act more like change agents than Property Managers. By changing current practices, you can help landlords and tenants get what they want when they want it, improve your efficiencies and strengthen the relationship.

Whether we like it or not, our world is changing around us, and we are all becoming accustomed to instant service and immediate results. Even in our own business at Console, we are thinking hard about how to provide a different service to you, our clients. A service that revolves around more than just telephone support and more than just the occasional contact with Console.

Offices all over the world are adopting a technology industry idea called Agile. And at Console we are no different, employing Agile practices to develop our next generation of Cloud software. And the influence we are seeing in how Agile is accelerating our Cloud development is spreading to all areas of our business and helping our teams to satisfy the needs of our clients, respond to changing requirements faster and maximising their output. Embracing Agile is how companies are re-inventing themselves and how the world of business works for the future.

We are now applying Agile to almost everything in our Console business. And it’s having a profound impact, not only in our business but with a variety of other businesses. We are seeing this as having a lasting effect in a range of industries and this includes areas that influence how Property Managers work.

So what is this Agile thing?

It’s quite simple. It’s about taking big projects, one that might seem too large to contemplate and chunking them down to lots of small to-do tasks. It also involves creating small teams to do a bit at a time. That way small issues can be dealt with before they are perceived as significant problems. And often big problems don’t get done because the sheer enormity induces hesitation. Taking one little task at a time lets the people involved measure the progress in small steps. It’s also about working with our users, experimenting, trying it out and finding a winning solution.

It’s affecting how people interact with each other. Increasingly the expectation is that big issues can be broken into tasks and progress can be reported as the task progress. Everyone has ownership and collaboration is greater.

But Property Managers have known this for a while. Taking a big event like onboarding a new property and breaking it down into all the small tasks that need to be done. This is Agile!

Now cloud computing – putting your programs and data into data centres and having it accessible on the internet is creating opportunities for Property Managers to co-operate with tenants, landlords and third party partners in even more efficient ways.

What makes Console’s Cloud Unique in Property Managment?

For suppliers like Console, it is not good enough to just convert your office software to have the same functionality in the cloud. At Console, we are using Agile to uncover better ways for you to collaborate with your clients. And our new cloud suite is now becoming a reality. Our first clients are expected to start using it in March this year! Cloud computing and Agile have combined to help companies like Console create and tweak products much faster than the competition. We are moving from the Information Age into the Agile Age!

What you can expect

So we can now use Agile to report to landlords and tenants about the progress of their projects and tasks. Console is taking Agile very seriously, not just in how we develop the next generation of Console in the cloud, but also how we help Property Managers & business owners work in an Agile Age to look after their properties, their landlords and their tenants. And most importantly, to look after themselves.